by kellie abrahamson kabrahamson1@aol.com
C- PG13 91 min.
J-Horror (“J” for Japanese) remake The Grudge was panned by critics when it was released in 2004. The poor reviews didn’t stop audiences from coming out in droves, however. The Grudge was a box office smash, earning over $183 million world wide. Thanks to the successful opening weekend, a sequel was announced three days after the film opened and here we are.
If you’ve read the sequel’s tagline (“What was once contained, will now be unleashed”), you’ve gotten a big clue as to what the film is about. Picking up just after Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar; TV’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), the first film’s protagonist, took on the murderous ghosts who haunt a Tokyo home, her estranged sister Aubrey (Amber Tamblyn; The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) is sent to Japan to bring her home. Stuck in the hospital under the watchful eye of the police, who accuse her of arson and murder, Karen remains tormented by the spirits of Kayako (Takako Fuji; Ju-on) and Toshio (newcomer Ohga Tanaka) Saeki, the mother and son who were killed in the house years ago. After a brief visit with her sister, Karen is once again haunted by the creepy pair, who chase her onto the hospital roof and subsequently push her off. Having witnessed her sister’s plunge to death, Aubrey resolves to find out why she died and teams up with Eason (Edison Chen; The Medallion), a Japanese reporter investigating the strange events surrounding the Saeki house.
While they are off searching for answers in 2004, two other storylines unfold in the present. Three American-exchange students in Tokyo find their way to the Saeki house and subsequently become haunted by Kayako and Toshio after not taking the now well-known legends seriously. At seemingly the same time, a family living in a Chicago apartment building start experiencing some strange happening when a hooded neighbor moves in next door. The three very loosely related storylines come together in the film’s final act when we realize who the neighbor is and how the curse of the grudge has changed.
If you were in the camp that hated The Grudge, then there really is no point in seeing the sequel despite the fact that the trailer looks like it may be scary. Just like the first film, The Grudge 2 falls far short of the mark. It isn’t scary in the least and ends up being more funny than anything else. Most of the acting in the film is just terrible. The only good performances came from Gellar, who was in the movie for maybe 5 minutes, and Arielle Kebbel (John Tucker Must Die), who plays one of the three exchange students terrorized by the ghosts. While her cringe-worthy dye job needed some work, Kebbel successfully takes on the scream queen role and is the only actor worth watching here. Tamblyn, who is supposed to be the one carrying the film’s major storyline, seems to fade into the background of each scene. Her only high points come when her character hears bad news, at which point she stares off into the distance in believable abject horror. Takashi Shimizu, the film’s director, must have liked it too as he had Tamblyn do it for half the film.
The story is flimsy at best. Writer Steven Susco seems to have forgotten all of the rules he created in the first film, taking his spirits out of Tokyo and into the States for no good, clear reason. Sure, it makes for a good, scary fun to have no one be immune to the curse, but why not let that happen from the beginning? Why confine the first film to the house just to release the curse on the world in the second? It seems like if that was the plan all along, the filmmakers would have tried to explain why the rules had changed. They don’t.
Admittedly, the cinematography and overall mood were quite effective, adding a bit of uneasiness to the air even at the beginning. At the screening I attended, the audience definitely picked up on it and reacted favorably to the first half of the film, at times literally screaming during the especially jumpy parts. About midway through, however, the feeling in the room shifted. People stopped being scared. People walked out. People laughed at inappropriate times and groaned when something that was supposed to be creepy fell flat. Even with the eerie atmosphere, without a solid storyline, a film won’t work. It’s what plagued the first film in the series and it’s the biggest failure of the second.
At this year’s Comic-Con in San Diego, Shimizu announced that a third installment of The Grudge will be made to complete the story. Not much is known about the storyline of this final film, but he did say that he would rather produce the film instead of directing it. Maybe that’s a good idea and maybe Susco should do something else as well. Perhaps some new blood will help fully form the story and bring the film up to the level it aspires to be. Thus far, The Grudge trilogy is nothing to write home about. Hopefully the third film will save the franchise… Or at least be watchable.
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